Following the call that higher education leaders need to reach beyond administration, UDI Vice Chair and Minu Ipe lays the framework leaders as designers for higher education transformation.
The Co-Lab@UDI
Leaders as Designers in Higher Education
Leaders must now act as designers—shaping systems, cultures, and strategies that anticipate the future rather than preserve the past.
Higher education globally is at cross roads today. The scale and complexity of today’s challenges demand more than stewardship alone from the leaders of universities. Incremental adjustments and administrative continuity, while valuable, are insufficient in a world defined by rapid technological, social, and demographic change. Leaders must now act as designers—shaping systems, cultures, and strategies that anticipate the future rather than preserve the past. The task is urgent: to confront institutional blind spots, embrace bold alternatives, and design universities capable of meeting the needs of their communities and generating sustaining impact at scale.
The mandate for leaders is clear and multifaceted. First, they must respond to exponential growth, creating flexible, technology-enabled, and inclusive systems that can expand access without sacrificing quality. Second, they must align universities with societal needs, ensuring that programs, research, and partnerships address workforce gaps, digital divides, public health, and other urgent challenges. Third, leaders must manage complexity and public scrutiny, balancing diverse stakeholder expectations while demonstrating the enduring value of higher education. Finally, they must embrace distributed leadership, cultivating teams with complementary skills and fostering a culture where faculty, staff, students, and partners are empowered to co-create transformative change.
What should leaders be designing in response to this mandate? It begins with confronting uncomfortable truths: that current models exclude too many learners; that research is often disconnected from societal needs; that universities have been slow to adapt compared to other sectors. Global higher education needs rapid evolution, not with more replication of existing models but with diverse, contextual, adaptable models, some of which might be improvements on existing ones, but with many others that are radically new. If this is both the hope and opportunity for higher education, who should leaders be and what should they do?
Based on our observations of institutions and leaders who have led transformative outcomes in higher education, we see six qualities that distinguish leaders who act as designers:
To lead as a designer requires more than vision and skill; it requires courage in practice. Courage to question entrenched traditions. Courage to challenge hierarchies that have endured for generations. Courage to take risks in environments where failure is scrutinized. Courage to engage stakeholders who may resist change. Courage to act boldly when the easier path is to manage quietly. Courage to accept the personal sacrifices needed to lead this way. And the courage to acknowledge that success is not guaranteed, and the price for such boldness may be one’s position and reputation.
The time has come for universities to redefine leadership. Stewardship will always matter, providing the wisdom, stability, and values on which institutions are built. But courage means moving beyond preservation. Design leadership is not about discarding the past. It is about honoring the values that make universities indispensable, while building the futures that will keep them vital. Universities cannot afford leaders who only guard the past; they need leaders who are designers, courageous enough to reimagine, redesign, and rebuild institutions that generate meaningful knowledge, drive social impact, and respond effectively to the complex challenges facing the world.
